Once you sign an NDA it’s good for life. Meaning legally, I shouldn’t tell you this story. But I have to.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Please Report Your Bug Here by Josh Riedel, an adrenaline-packed debut novel about a dating app employee who discovers a glitch that transports him to other worlds—available now from Henry Holt and Co.
A college grad with the six-figure debt to prove it, Ethan Block views San Francisco as the place to be. Yet his job at hot new dating app DateDate is a far cry from what he envisioned. Instead of making the world a better place, he reviews flagged photo queues, overworked and stressed out. But that’s about to change.
Reeling from a breakup, Ethan decides to view his algorithmically matched soulmate on DateDate. He overrides the system and clicks on the profile. Then, he disappears. One minute, he’s in a windowless office, and the next, he’s in a field of endless grass, gasping for air. When Ethan snaps back to DateDate HQ, he’s convinced a coding issue caused the blip. Except for anyone to believe him, he’ll need evidence. As Ethan embarks on a wild goose chase, moving from dingy startup think tanks to Silicon Valley’s dominant tech conglomerate, it becomes clear that there’s more to DateDate than meets the eye. With the stakes rising, and a new world at risk, Ethan must choose who—and what—he believes in.
I closed the content review queue and sent off a few emails turning down press interviews from lower-tier publications I knew the Founder wouldn’t waste his time with. Then I put my computer to sleep and opened DateDate on my phone, hoping that focused engagement with the app would inspire a mission statement.
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I was a prolific DateDate user, though only for testing purposes. I wasn’t looking for a partner so soon after my breakup with Isabel. Work kept me way too busy. Still, I needed to find out, for the sake of this mission statement, what it was like to finally see my top match. And to do that, I had to answer more of the app’s questions.
The tell-us-about-yourself questions were written by some New Age psychologist in West Marin—“a friend of a friend,” the Founder said—and seemed so innocent and lightweight that the typical user answered approximately six hundred in their first week. This was part of the secret to our success, the ability to induce a flow state in the user on sign-up. The algorithm started out with easy questions—your favorite foods, hobbies, animals—and gradually began to pepper in questions on more sensitive topics: your fears, fantasies, medical history. The user, not wanting to break momentum, would answer those questions without thinking. Only after you completed a thousand questions would we show you a set of matches.
We needed to keep our churn rate low, so match results were throttled. Instead of showing your top match right away, we’d show you profiles with an eighty percent compatibility rate. Only after you dated all matches in that bracket would we show you the next percentile up. At that point, we also granted you the ability to share one new photo to your profile daily, so long as you continued to answer the tell-us-about-yourself questions. Users were as obsessive about curating photos as they were about answering questions. The photos allowed them to express themselves in ways words couldn’t.
Users paired with their 90th-percentile matches were a minority in the first couple months of the app’s existence. Considered our power users, they answered, on average, over four thousand questions and dated between thirteen and fifteen lower-percentile matches before finding true love in the 91–93 percent range. In other words, they never met their top match, though of course they never knew that. (We did not display compatibility rates publicly.)
Thanks to my admin privileges, I didn’t have to date my lower-percentile matches before viewing my top match. But I couldn’t skip the questions. I had answered 9,873, and I only needed to answer 127 more before I could see my top match. I set to work.
I always used the app at home, on my own time, in my own space. But I needed to complete this task, now. Even if the content review queue became impossibly backed up. Even if emails went unanswered. I put on my headphones and blocked everything else out. Hours passed, and I entered into a trance state, small hits of serotonin keeping me alert as I tackled the questions. It was slightly addictive, to reveal to the app—and to myself—what it was that made me me. Especially this far in the process, when the basic questions were dropped for more open-ended questions like:
If you could be invisible or have the power of flight, which would you choose?
I would fly, because even if someone spotted me in hiding, I could fly away. Also, as a kid my dad always asked me if I’d ever had a flying dream, and I never did, still never have, and how great would it be if I could tell him that even though I’ve never had a flying dream, I could fly in real life? Then again, I s [character limit exceeded]
If your soul—or “essence”—is a basketball, what color is the ball?
Orange? I don’t get the question. What if I don’t believe in any kind of soul or essence? What if I believe what science says, that what we are and what we see are [character limit exceeded]
What is the last living organism you saw?
The engineer, who just walked past me to use the bathroom again. Wait, no, the plant in the corner of the office, which, now that I think about it, I’m not even sure is real. Who waters it? No sunlight comes in. I have to check… OK, confirmed it is real. How could that be? So I guess that’s the last living organism [character limit exceeded]
We knew answering yes-or-no questions in a single tap was more efficient than these free-form responses. But it was about quality, not speed. The investors, who worried about user retention, were the only reason we imposed character limits in the response field. That was the Founder’s compromise for not imple- menting a slew of other suggestions the investors pushed, such as swiping left or right on profile photos to indicate whether you find another user attractive. That’s not to say we didn’t let you browse photos. It’s just that we made you earn your time.
After a few minutes of browsing, the tell-us-about-yourself questions took over the screen; answering a certain number allowed you to browse again. DateDate defied all rules about how to make an engaging app—“so much friction,” one early reviewer in TechCrunch stated—and yet our userbase continued to grow, and hardly anyone left. The Founder compared this friction to opening a good bottle of whisky—the slow process of removing the wax seal made you more desirous of what was inside. No need to rush. We were crafting the perfect experience of love.
I considered the tell-us-about-yourself questions the heart of the app. The questions weren’t intended to tell potential partners about you; they were geared toward self-discovery. “I’m a mystery to myself,” the Founder said, in his pitch before I left my previous job to work on DateDate full-time. “How could I possibly know what—or whom—I want?”
But that was only part of the story. DateDate’s real secret sauce was our mood-sensing tech. We used the phone’s camera, microphone, and accelerometer to understand your current mood. This determined the quantity and intensity of questions presented in your session. The camera captured facial expressions (smiles, frowns, squints); the microphone captured critical vocalizations such as yawns, grunts, and “highly mood indicative words” such as “lucky” or “bummed” or “sexy”; and the accelerometer tracked your movements and the movements of your phone, from where you used the app (in a café, in the car, in bed) to whether your phone was facing up or down (facing down meant you might be feeling shy or introverted, so fewer questions). Nobody raised issues about this tech because nobody was aware we employed it. We buried our disclosure deep in our Terms of Use. Besides, it wasn’t that invasive. Other startups were worse. At least we weren’t selling your genetic data.
Anticipating my top match, I hoped to feel an instant connection. With Isabel, our love was gradual, not instant. Which was fine, and maybe more realistic, but I couldn’t help craving that more elusive movie-love. Love like whatever swam laps inside me the first time I watched Emily Hubley’s animation in Hedwig and the Angry Inch my freshman year of college. Love as a quest for a long-lost partner. Love as fated, loved as earned. A love at the end of ten thousand questions.
Top match available, a pop-up read. View now? Yes / No.
I tapped Yes.
Riley S.’s short bio read, Cornell alum in Hartford. Explorer at heart. In search of meaningful connection (not hookups). I scanned her photos: a fountain near buildings in what I assumed was downtown Hartford; a steaming cup of green tea on a small plate made of green-tinted glass; her muddy hiking boots. I scrolled down to her answers, where one was displayed randomly by our algorithm. What would you do with a billion dollars? Her answer: Give it away. I was starting to like her. Finally, I reached her profile photo, blurred. We intentionally blurred profile photos and positioned them at the bottom of the screen to encourage users to connect with their matches on a more intimate level before judging their physical qualities. Tapping into the photo triggered a pop-up: By viewing this photo you agree to send a photo of yourself to this user.
I tapped on Riley S.’s photo. The pop-up appeared. I swept my hair out of my face. Accept.
The app took my photo and showed me Riley S.
She was posed in a vineyard, a glass of wine in hand. I didn’t recognize her or the vineyard, and I didn’t feel any of the emotions I expected. I didn’t feel attracted or aroused or curious or in love. No, I didn’t feel any of that.
Instead, I felt like I was falling.
I clutched the arm of my chair and held on tight. I was in the office and I was not. And then there I was, not at my desk or in the vineyard with my top match, but in an undefined space. A vast, empty space. Well, not entirely empty. I was in a field, with tall, wet grass, and above me the sky was wide and filled with birds, and in the distance, though I couldn’t see it over the grassy knoll, I heard the ocean, the churn of waves.
Gravity worked, but it wasn’t pulling me down the same way it usually did, because I felt light, like I could fly, although when I tried, I only floated in place for a second before tumbling to the ground. Hello? I cried. Nobody answered. I tried to take deep breaths, to calm myself and assess my situation. But I felt so untethered from myself that I panicked. I needed someone to touch or talk to, someone to assure me I still existed. I rubbed my hands together and searched for the small scar on my wrist where as a kid I let the scissors slip. It was there, the faint mark that told me these hands were mine, this was me. I placed my palm over my chest. My heart was pounding. I stood and tilted my head back. Birds flew across the cloudless sky. As they disappeared into the horizon, another flock emerged behind me and followed the same path. Watching the birds steadied my breath. I could hear not only the churn of distant waves but also the birds squawking overhead and the whistle of the wind through the tall grass. A human noise, too. Possibly laughter, or crying? A bird dropped from the sky, dead, and landed at my feet. Then another, and another. Panicked, I ran fast through the field, toward the sounds of the ocean, until I was back in the office.
“You okay?” the Founder asked. “I can hear you breathing.”
I wiggled my toes in my shoes, which I expected to be soaked from running through the grass, but they were dry. “I’m fine.” I glanced at my phone, at DateDate. Riley S.’s profile photo was nothing more than a black rectangle. I’d just seen her photo. What happened to it? “Do you see this?” I asked the Founder, holding up my phone, my hand shaking.
He glanced over at me. “Add it to the bug report,” he said. “We should have a fix out soon.”
“This is different,” I said.
“How so?” The Founder swiveled his chair to look directly at me. The faux-Noguchi IKEA lamp flickered, and in that moment I lost all memory of what had happened, of where I had gone. I recalled an odd sensation, almost as if I had blacked out, but nothing else.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“It’s that damn memory issue,” he said, returning to his screen. “We need more engineers,” he muttered, which made me, a nontechnical person, feel worthless.
Stunned, I opened the bug-tracking system. The familiar motions of filing the bug began to put me at ease. I convinced myself that whatever happened was an issue I could document, log, and resolve. Black-box image bug, I wrote, and attached Riley S.’s profile photo. I noticed that the photo wasn’t entirely black: the bottom half contained wavy lines. I zoomed in to analyze the image but was jolted out of my investigation by the ding of a new email: Warning: Content Review Queue Full. I printed out the photo and tucked it into my messenger bag to investigate later.
Excerpted from Please Report Your Bug Here, copyright © 2023 by Josh Riedel.
